Chris Jordan with an image depicting 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.

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Seattle-based photographer and photographic artist Chris Jordan gave a great presentation today. He's vibrant, well-spoken and, despite saying all sorts of do-gooder stuff, still somehow comes across as cool. We think he rules and we've covered his stuff here and here, but let's give you a few highlights from his talk.

Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.Make it Visual. Chris believes that we're not hardwired to understand statistics. His mission is to transform statistics into compelling altered photographs to help us homo sapiens be able to relate to them, to truly feel them.

Big Stuff is Made of Little Stuff. His pictures are often composites of millions of small things; aluminum cans, cell phones, bottles, etc.. He hopes to help people understand that these big, scary phenomena are still composed of single units and as such, our small moves matter and can make both a positive and negative impact.

Through his photographs, he wants to help people face up to what is, to help them "feel" the American consumer system and understand that their actions truly matter, that these bigger problems are really simply a matter of millions of small moves made by you and I. Can you feel me here people?

Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Three random-but-important points from his presentation:

1) He shows a picture of a car shredding place in Tacoma and talks about how we shred these cars, send them back to China, they make ships out of them, fill them full of plastic and head them back toward us.2) Another picture shows a dump containing thousands of cell chargers (actual cell phones are pictured above), Chris noted that surprisingly many of them clearly had never been used as they still had the little twistie things on them. Sad.3) Yet another is a Seurat painting created from many small pictures of aluminum cans. The picture is composed of 106,000 cans, which is what the U.S. uses in 30 seconds (yikes). This is a 70x100 foot wall. Chris quipped that it's particularly sad as the contents of these are mostly sugared water and piss-poor beer.